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Ottawa Wants to Build a War Machine. It Can’t Even Build a Helicopter

A half-trillion-dollar pledge faces a procurement system famous for boondoggles

In 1986, Canada set out to build its own helicopter. The goal was not just to replace the Royal Canadian Navy’s Sea Kings—so old that many entered service before the moon landings—but to rejuvenate a domestic industry.

Yet changes in government, alongside years of technical setbacks, shifting specifications, and escalating costs, repeatedly delayed the replacement. Contracts were cancelled, revived, and redesigned. In the meantime, Sea King crews contended with electrical failures and engine breakdowns, while mechanics routinely cannibalized retired fuselages for parts. The helicopter ultimately delivered in 2015—the CH-148 Cyclone—arrived decades after the Sea Kings belonged in a museum, and only after Ottawa spent billions keeping the aging aircraft safely in the air.

The Cyclone fiasco endures as one of the country’s most notorious procurement disasters. It also serves as a cautionary tale at a time when defence policy is back in vogue. Amid a decline of the American-dominated liberal order, hard power is retaking its place as the main currency of international relations. In his Davos speech back in January, Prime Minister Mark Carney called this a “rupture”—a messy and violent interregnum marked by an insidious return to the geopolitical Darwinism of the nineteenth century. At a time when a tired global system of rules and treaties staggers on amid a spike in spectacular acts of brutality and lawlessness, Carney urged mid-sized countries to form a collective counterweight against rogue hegemons.

His government has been busy trying to meet the moment. Last June, it committed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s target of members spending 5 percent of gross domestic product on defence by 2035. In November, it committed an extra $81.8 billion over five years toward modernizing the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). A month later, it unveiled a $357.7 million Regional Defence Investment Initiative with the intention of distributing the money across the country to build up manufacturing clusters—shipbuilding in one region, aerospace in another, artificial intelligence elsewhere.

Perhaps the biggest plank arrived in February, with the release of the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS). The plan touts investment promises totalling more than half a trillion dollars. By steering more contracts toward Canadian firms, it envisions creating 125,000 jobs and growing the country’s defence industry to more than three times its current size within a decade. Military expansion is part of the project. The bigger plan is unwinding Canada’s dependence on foreign—especially American—technology, infrastructure, and supply chains.

These are laudable vows to reverse the neglect and underinvestment that have left Canada’s military in shambles. However, this industrial blueprint amounts to targets on paper. Implementation will collide with wickedly complex real-world obstacles. Experts predict that Ottawa’s ossified management style isn’t agile enough to fully grasp the speed at which technologies are developed in the private sector. They also warn that Canadian companies building those new technologies struggle to hold onto their ideas, patents, and talent in a country that has done an astonishingly poor job of protecting intellectual property.

Future direct military spending of 3.5 percent of GDP alone will eclipse $150 billion annually, according to government estimates. “There’s going to be a lot of money sloshing around in this system,” cautioned Richard Shimooka, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. “The question is whether that leads to something we can sustain and actually benefits the long-term Canadian economy. Or will it be a sugar high, where we set up a few factories, build some equipment and then shut it down, wasting a whole bunch of money that could have been better used somewhere else?”

Polling conducted by Nanos Research in late 2025 suggests 65 percent of Canadians believe the country needs a strong military in today’s world to be effective in international relations. But that level of support may ebb as the bills come due. David Pugliese, a veteran Canadian defence reporter, told me he predicts defence spending could become easy prey for opposition attacks in the coming years. “If you’re going to spend over $150 billion per year on defence by 2035, the Canadian taxpayer and politician is going to want jobs.”

It’s a mammoth task, though not impossible. But vast sums, compressed timelines, and politically motivated targets—it all seems like a textbook environment for mismanagement and underperformance. Canada could end up even more unequipped to deal with a more hostile world. It could be Cyclones all the way down.

Since the end of the Cold War, the CAF has been structured mainly to fight overseas threats through joint operations. “We’ve been able to ignore or downplay the defence of Canada,” Philippe Lagassé, associate professor and the Barton chair at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, told me.

That’s rapidly changing. Canada is a giant land mass with multiple coastlines and far removed from many of its allies. Defending the homeland while fulfilling our treaty obligations is a tall order. NATO’s Article 5 provision commits Canada to aiding fellow alliance members that fall under attack. Participation also demands military interoperability with partner forces. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) binds Canada and the United States together in ensuring aerospace surveillance and control over North America, including vast stretches of the Arctic. This calls for greater CAF strength in sea and air. The DIS explicitly aims to beef up all of these strategic capabilities, in part so Canada can more assertively safeguard its own backyard.

Factoring into this is massive technological change. Adversaries can now harass or deceive a larger opponent at great expense to the target. Last fall, for example, flat-footed NATO militaries in Europe scrambled their most advanced fighter jets and precision-guided munitions to destroy cheap Russian drones that probed their airspace.

Many experts believe Canada’s rearmament should prioritize affordable, expendable systems that provide advantage in wars of attrition. Ukrainian forces have used millions of aerial drones, land robots, and AI-powered targeting systems to freeze the conflict along the 1,250-kilometre front lines. They have kept shipping lifelines in the Black Sea open........

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